Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't you mean extinct?

fabiensanglard.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 145 posts

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#111

Post by fuckaiwriter »

overgard wrote: post #58
bitwize wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he is correct. LLMs have much larger working memories for the kind of details you work with in programming tasks. You are at an objective cognitive deficit by not taking advantage of this. Everybody knows what he means by left behind. When you program, you do so with a goal in mind, and you will not be able to reach that goal as quickly without LLMs. You will be outcompeted by those who use them, and this means t…

How many other technologies required death threats for adoption?

Until the “adopter” themselves find them at the other end of the barrel.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#112

Post by GalaxyNova »

01284a7e wrote: post #5

"Ride the wave." Or don't. Most LLMs people are using to code are paywalled, and controlled by private, for-profit entities. This is fundamentally different than the past, and diametrically opposed to the hacker. If you're a hacker, which most of you are not (things have changed here over time), you will reject this.

It's reminiscent of the proprietary compilers of the 80s

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#113

Post by bryanlarsen »

My_Name wrote: post #55
bryanlarsen wrote: post #6

> I asked an LLM to write a Levenshtein distance function instead of adding a dependency to my project. Which you likely failed to review thoroughly, so may be subtly wrong.

How many dependencies do you review the source code of?

What good would that do me? Levenshtein distance is one of those things that's trivial on the surface, but I have no idea if there are tricky edge conditions.

I do one better: I pull from a trusted creator or I review things like GitHub issues to ensure better people than me have reviewed it.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#115

Post by physicalecon »

atombender wrote: post #69
ChiperSoft wrote: post #53

This analogy has layers that OP probably doesn't recognize. The film industry loves cgi because none of the digital vfx houses are unionized and they can treat the artists like crap. It severely devalued a ton of skilled labor around miniature and set design. Now, after 20 years of hard swing into cgi, people are starting to recognize just how much better movies from the practical era looked, and there is a push back…

> Project Hail Mary was predominantly practical effects Don't drink the Kool Aid. The studios love to make this sort of claim — recent examples include F1: The Movie, Top Gun: Maverick, and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, and you'll see interviews where the main actors say it was all real — but it's just marketing. Project Hail Mary leans heavily on CG. For example, while they did hire a puppeteer (he ende…

[dead]

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#116

Post by lstodd »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #46
lstodd wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see no sense in fighting for "independent development and universal access" of and to a fundamentally useless thing. I only snark at those who try to mislabel that thing as something useful. Which it is not.

I see no sense in fighting for "independent development and universal access" of and to a fundamentally useless thing. That's why they call us "hackers," and they call you something else.

Haha no. "Fighting for" is political activism, not hacking.

Find curious uses for, exploit in inventive ways, reimplement even -- yes. Fighting -- get off our lawn.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#117

Post by nullsanity »

echelon wrote: post #41
skydhash wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My output sometimes rivals that of entire teams' I've been part of, mostly because I get to just code to my heart's content. The fact is that often I code less than most of my peers. Because I prefer spending some time to design suitable data structures/algorithms for the problem at hand. I don't aim for perfection, just that it align with the business domain (and/or the interface) so that future works are proporti…

> I prefer spending some time to design suitable data structures/algorithms for the problem at hand. I'm doing this at LLM speed now. I feel like I'm doing the work of two whole teams and designing rock-solid software. Rust, strong types, enums, fantastic interfaces, brevity.

[dead]

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#118

Post by jamesfinlayson »

nkrisc wrote: post #38
stickfigure wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? Customer meaningful features that move the needle on the business. I think this is strictly true. And not because LLMs can write code faster. I think it's true even if you're still writing most of your code by hand and using the LLM as an assistant. My anecdotal but decades-long observation is that most of the time=cost of a project comes not from writing code, but…

Realistically, has the volume of code that can be produced ever been the bottleneck? In every job I’ve ever had, it was never that the devs couldn’t write enough code fast enough, it was everything else that slowed them down, mostly other people.

7 years ago my biggest bottle-neck was waiting for a tester to test my code. Fast forward to now, my biggest bottle-neck is waiting for a tester, and my team-mates using AI to generate mega-patches that they don't bother testing is just making it worse.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#119

Post by jamesfinlayson »

saghm wrote: post #30
inglor_cz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with regard to quality is quite the opposite. With LLM at my disposal, I had the time- and effort-budget to expand test suites considerably, I was even able to attack a somewhat thorny question of reproducible builds on MSVC, which is not exactly friendly towards determinism. These tasks would take me personally so much time that I would have to set them aside, at the cost of output quality.

Sure, but this is not at all uniform in how people use these tools any more than there was uniformity in how people balanced quality and speed before LLMs entered the picture. There was already a lot of variety in how some developers moved fast and broke things, others moved slow and fixed things, some would prototype new crazy ideas and others would spent time on the long tail of getting something from working adequ…

Yep, none of my current team-mates test their work especially thoroughly... so now we have even more bugs being found in testing in production. Not a net win.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#120

Post by schoen »

piokoch wrote: post #59
greenavocado wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

127. A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological support-systems. When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no…

Yup, that is called progress. One freedom to live in a cave with his 6 spouses and hunting animals all day was indeed taken away. In exchange you don't need to hunt all day, you can go to groceries, you don't need six spouses and 20 kids, as kids death rate is not 80% but 0.001%. One can, obviously, romanticize the times of cave live, that's fine with me, but I doubt that would be a common choice.

I really believe in technological progress and would strongly defend and advocate for it. I'm also very distressed by the idea that we have an absolute ratchet of more surveillance (and registration, monitoring, and licensing of people and their daily activities) over time.

My intuition has always been that these things don't have to go together, but it's often sounded like a number of people who've thought about it a lot expect that they do! (One reason is that technological advances create new technical means of surveillance and new technical means of data analysis which can include more storage and analysis of personal data. Another reason is more like Kaczynski's account above, that people are afraid of bigger or more frequent harms that can be caused by more-empowered individuals, so they put in place more restrictions or surveillance to try to mitigate or deter some of those harms.) Can anyone reassure me about this? Is there a future in which people have greater capability, and there are also fewer institutions or mechanisms proactively monitoring us?

I'm aware of portions of the history of that conversation but would love to hear your take or the take of other HN members.

Post reply on HN